Headlines
On February 13, the Wall Road Journal reported one thing that hadn’t been public earlier than: the Pentagon used Anthropic’s Claude AI in the course of the January raid that captured Venezuelan Chief Nicolás Maduro.
It mentioned Claude’s deployment got here by means of Anthropic’s partnership with Palantir Applied sciences, whose platforms are broadly utilized by the Protection Division.
Reuters tried to independently confirm the report – they could not. Anthropic declined to touch upon particular operations. The Division of Protection declined to remark. Palantir mentioned nothing.
However the WSJ report revealed another element.
Someday after the January raid, an Anthropic worker reached out to somebody at Palantir and requested a direct query: how was Claude really utilized in that operation?
The corporate that constructed the mannequin and signed the $200 million contract needed to ask another person what their very own software program did throughout a army assault on a capital metropolis.
This one element tells you the whole lot about the place we really are with AI governance. It additionally tells you why “human within the loop” stopped being a security assure someplace between the contract signing and Caracas.
How massive was the operation
Calling this a covert extraction misses what really occurred.
Delta Pressure raided a number of targets throughout Caracas. Greater than 150 plane had been concerned. Air protection techniques had been suppressed earlier than the primary boots hit the bottom. Airstrikes hit army targets and air defenses, and digital warfare property had been moved into the area, per Reuters.
Cuba later confirmed 32 of its troopers and intelligence personnel had been killed and declared two days of nationwide mourning. Venezuela’s authorities cited a loss of life toll of roughly 100.
Two sources advised Axios that Claude was used in the course of the lively operation itself, although Axios famous it couldn’t verify the exact position Claude performed.
What Claude would possibly even have achieved
To know what might have been occurring, you might want to know one technical factor about how Claude works.
Anthropic’s API is stateless. Every name is unbiased i.e. you ship textual content in, you get textual content again, and that interplay is over. There is no persistent reminiscence or Claude working repeatedly within the background.
It is much less like a mind and extra like a particularly quick advisor you possibly can name each thirty seconds: you describe the scenario, they offer you their finest evaluation, you dangle up, you name once more with new info.
That is the API. However that claims nothing in regards to the techniques Palantir constructed on prime of it.
You’ll be able to engineer an agent loop that feeds real-time intelligence into Claude repeatedly. You’ll be able to construct workflows the place Claude’s outputs set off the following motion with minimal latency between advice and execution.
Testing These Situations Myself
To know what this really seems like in observe, I examined a few of these eventualities.
each 30 seconds. indefinitely.
The API is stateless. A classy army system constructed on the API does not must be.
What which may appear to be when deployed:
Intercepted communications in Spanish fed to Claude for fast translation and sample evaluation throughout lots of of messages concurrently. Satellite tv for pc imagery processed to determine automobile actions, troop positions, or infrastructure modifications with updates each jiffy as new photographs arrived.
Or real-time synthesis of intelligence from a number of sources – indicators intercepts, human intelligence reviews, digital warfare knowledge – compressed into actionable briefings that will take analysts hours to provide manually.
skilled on eventualities. deployed in Caracas.
None of that requires Claude to “resolve” something. It is all evaluation and synthesis.
However whenever you’re compressing a four-hour intelligence cycle into minutes, and that evaluation is feeding straight into operational choices being made at that very same compressed timescale, the excellence between “evaluation” and “decision-making” begins to break down.
And since this can be a labeled community, no person outdoors that system is aware of what was really constructed.
So when somebody says “Claude cannot run an autonomous operation” – they’re in all probability proper in regards to the API stage. Whether or not they’re proper in regards to the deployment stage is a totally totally different query. And one no person can at present reply.
Hole between autonomous and significant
Anthropic’s exhausting restrict is autonomous weapons – techniques that resolve to kill with no human signing off. That is an actual line.
However there’s an infinite quantity of territory between “autonomous weapons” and “significant human oversight.” Take into consideration what it means in observe for a commander in an lively operation. Claude is synthesizing intelligence throughout knowledge volumes no analyst might maintain of their head. It is compressing what was a four-hour briefing cycle into minutes.
this took 3 seconds.
It is surfacing patterns and proposals sooner than any human group might produce them.
Technically, a human approves the whole lot earlier than any motion is taken. The human is within the course of. However the course of is now shifting so quick that it turns into not possible to judge what’s in it in quick paced eventualities like a army assault.When Claude generates an intelligence abstract, that abstract turns into the enter for the following resolution. And since Claude can produce these summaries a lot sooner than people can course of them, the tempo of the whole operation accelerates.
You’ll be able to’t decelerate to consider carefully a couple of advice when the scenario it describes is already three minutes outdated. The knowledge has moved on. The subsequent replace is already arriving. The loop retains getting sooner.
90 seconds to resolve. that is what the loop seems like from inside.
The requirement for human approval is there however the means to meaningfully consider what you are approving will not be.
And it will get structurally worse the higher the AI will get as a result of higher AI means sooner synthesis, shorter resolution home windows, much less time to assume earlier than appearing.
Pentagon and Claude’s arguments
The Pentagon desires entry to AI fashions for any use case that complies with U.S. regulation. Their place is basically: utilization coverage is our drawback, not yours.
However Anthropic desires to keep up particular prohibitions – no absolutely autonomous weapons and prohibiting mass home surveillance of People.
After the WSJ broke the story, a senior administration official advised Axios their partnership/settlement was beneath evaluate and that is the rationale Pentagon said:
“Any firm that will jeopardize the operational success of our warfighters within the subject is one we have to reevaluate.”
However paradoxically, Anthropic is at present the one industrial AI mannequin accepted for sure labeled DoD networks. Though, OpenAI, Google, and xAI are all actively in discussions to get onto these techniques with fewer restrictions.
The actual combat past arguments
In hindsight, Anthropic and the Pentagon is likely to be lacking the whole level and pondering coverage languages would possibly clear up this subject.
Contracts can mandate human approval at each step. However, that doesn’t imply the human has sufficient time, context, or cognitive bandwidth to really consider what they’re approving. That hole between a human technically within the loop and a human really capable of assume clearly about what’s in it’s the place the actual danger lives.
Rogue AI and autonomous weapons are in all probability the later set of arguments.
At this time’s debate ought to be – would you name it “supervised” whenever you put a system that processes info orders of magnitude sooner than people right into a human command chain?
Remaining ideas
In Caracas, in January, with 150 plane and real-time feeds and choices being made at operational velocity and we do not know the reply to that.
And neither does Anthropic.
However quickly, with fewer restrictions in place and extra fashions on these labeled networks, we’re all going to search out out.
All claims on this piece are sourced to public reporting and documented specs. We have now no personal details about this operation. Sources: WSJ (Feb 13), Axios (Feb 13, Feb 15), Reuters (Jan 3, Feb 13). Casualty figures from Cuba’s official authorities assertion and Venezuela’s protection ministry. API structure from platform.claude.com/docs. Contract particulars from Anthropic’s August 2025 press launch. “Visibility into utilization” quote from Axios (Feb 13).
